On Sun, 12 Nov 1995, Gavin Nicol wrote:
> >Pull the blinders back off. IGNORE PDF. There is a general problem with
> >restarting partially transmitted documents that that is just a special
> >case of. We need a method of saying *for any document what-so-ever*:
> >"Send me bytes 10000 through 20000".
>
> Wrong. We need a method of saying "Send me pieces n to m".
>
> BTW. Your argument that EOL conversion by servers is "badly broken" is
> also wrong. I fully expect to see servers capable of coded character
> set and encoding translation appearing in the very near future. For
> such servers, byte ranges are simply BAD (Broken As Designed), because
> a byte might no longer be the atomic unit of information, and because,
> as Chuck pointed out, the server would have to convert *everything*,
> and then select the piece requested.
On consideration - the EOL conversion issue is just another red herring.
It simply doesn't matter to the question of byte ranges. Byte ranges
*clearly* should apply to the transmitted byte stream - not the server side
representation of said byte stream. And one way or another the byte
stream is *always* generated. And unless your conversion is
non-deterministic the byte-stream will always be the same from the same
source document for a given GET request. The byte is inherently the
atomic unit of information in HTTP. What connects a server to a client
*is* a byte stream. End point representations of that byte stream
should be completely irrelevant to the issue of byte ranges.
--
Benjamin Franz